About the Opera

The Center Cannot Hold: A Chamber Opera is a new musical work based on the memoir of the same name by Elyn Saks. Dr. Wells composed the music and is co-librettist. The idea of developing the new opera came about after Dr. Saks, Law Professor at USC and MacArthur Award winner, served as a guest speaker for a performance of The First Lady Opera. “Let’s collaborate!” said Saks after the performance; “OK” said Wells, “A research grant or an opera?” “Both,” Saks replied.

The research grant about state variations in use of physical restraints in psychiatric hospitals was not funded; but the opera is now completed. The opera is based on a period of hospitalization in New Haven when Dr. Saks was in law school. Several different hospitalizations in different institutions with different attending physicians were consolidated into one episode to simplify the story. While largely based on the book, some scenes, particularly those about providers, are fictionalized, based in part of experiences of Wells as a medical student and psychiatry resident during roughly the same period as Saks’ New Haven hospitalizations. The opera uses portions of the poem by William Butler Yeats of the same title, a quotation from Aristotle, and paraphrases and adapts portions of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, as the real-life Saks survived one of her terrifying experiences of hours in restraints by yelling the theme that opens this symphony.

The opera is about a significant step in the road to recovery after Saks learned early in her life that she had a severe and persistent form of mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia. Although she struggled for years with acceptance of the diagnosis and alternatively accepted and resisted medications, she eventually learned that a combination of medication and psychoanalysis helped her maintain her coping and live a rewarding life. She has lead a brilliant career and maintained a happy and loving marriage, and enjoys many friends and colleagues. The opera is not about all of those successes. This Opera, is about the first step: a turning point for a young woman facing overwhelming odds of succumbing to a devastating illness, who decides to do her best to live her life fully and ends up graduating from Yale Law School and developing a lasting friendship.